July 2009 Archives

Sikeston, Mississippi police lead a couple of "bounty-hunters" who it turns out were neither licensed nor in possession of the right name of their suspects, to the home of David and Jenny Carnell, in the middle of the night. whom they proceed to terrorize at gunpoint.

Prince William county police bust into Manassas family baptism party, taser and arrest the homeowner, a grandfather, a 55 year old family counselor and Bible study teacher for "public intoxication" in his own backyard, then taser 25 year old pregnant woman in the back when she tries to help him up after being knocked to the ground by taser. She, of course, is then arrested for "assaulting an officer".

Police in Virginia entered a backyard party filled with children and
ended up Tasering a 55-year-old grandfather as well as a pregnant
mother.

The man, a family counselor and Bible study teacher, was arrested
for public intoxication even though he was in his own backyard the
entire time.

Public intoxication in the privacy of his own home.

They were celebrating the baptism of two little boys. The mother of
the boys tried helping the man when he fell to the ground after being
Tased, but she was Tased herself.

Prince William County Police charged her with assault on a police officer.

Part of the interaction between Rodriguez Sr. and the cops was
caught on a home video camera. It doesn't show any combativeness from
his part.

Oh yeah, there's one other thing. The family is Hispanic and some
didn't speak English. The woman who was arrested, the mother of the
kids and the mother of one on its way, is apparently facing deportation
because she is being detained by immigration officials.

Mobile police used pepper spray and a Taser on a deaf and mentally
disabled man Friday after they were unable to get him to come out of a
bathroom at a Dollar General store, authorities said.

After
forcibly removing Antonio Love from the bathroom of the Azalea Road
store, officers attempted to book the 37-year-old, on charges of
resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and failure to obey a police
officer, but the magistrate on duty at the jail refused to accept any
of those charges.

Love's family members said they had no idea where he was during the time that
police had him in custody. Brodrick Love said the officers dropped his brother
off in the parking lot of their apartment building without saying what
happened or why his brother had been missing for six hours.

Newly declassified documents reveal that an active member of Students
for a Democratic Society and Port Militarization Resistance in
Washington state was actually an informant for the US military. The man
everyone knew as "John Jacob" was in fact John Towery, a member of the
Force Protection Service at Fort Lewis. The military's role in the
spying raises questions about possibly illegal activity. The Posse
Comitatus law bars the use of the armed forces for law enforcement
inside the United States. The Fort Lewis military base denied our
request for an interview. But in a statement to Democracy Now, the
base's Public Affairs office publicly acknowledged for the first time
that Towery is a military operative. "This could be one of the key
revelations of this era," said Eileen Clancy, who has closely tracked
government spying on activist organizations.

Do call 911 immediately if you see a car with people sitting in it
apparently going no where. They are waiting to make a drug connection.

Yikes! Sounds like a rather loose definition of suspicious activity,
a rather low bar to clear for a 911 call, an invitation to all sorts of
profiling, and a little like those unconstitutional loitering statutes. So we called SPD to confirm that these are, indeed, their desired instructions.

The most consequential decision of the Supreme Court's last term got only a little attention when it landed in May. And what attention it got was for the wrong reason.

But the lower courts have certainly understood the significance of the decision, Ashcroft v. Iqbal,
which makes it much easier for judges to dismiss civil lawsuits right
after they are filed. They have cited it more than 500 times in just
the last two months.

"Iqbal is the most significant Supreme
Court decision in a decade for day-to-day litigation in the federal
courts," said Thomas C. Goldstein, an appellate lawyer with Akin Gump
Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington.

On its face, the Iqbal decision concerned the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. The court ruled that a Muslim man swept up on immigration charges could not sue two Bush administration officials for what he said was the terrible abuse he suffered in detention.

But
something much deeper and broader was going on in the decision,
something that may unsettle how civil litigation is conducted in the
United States. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who dissented from the decision, told
a group of federal judges last month that the ruling was both important
and dangerous. "In my view," Justice Ginsburg said, "the court's
majority messed up the federal rules" governing civil litigation.

For
more than half a century, it has been clear that all a plaintiff had to
do to start a lawsuit was to file what the rules call "a short and
plain statement of the claim" in a document called a complaint. Having
filed such a bare-bones complaint, plaintiffs were entitled to force
defendants to open their files and submit to questioning under oath.

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation's
pre-eminent African-American scholars, was arrested Thursday afternoon
at his home by Cambridge police investigating a possible break-in. The
incident raised concerns among some Harvard faculty that Gates was a
victim of racial profiling.

Police arrived at Gates' Ware Street
home near Harvard Square at 12:44 p.m. to question him. Gates, director
of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American
Research at Harvard, had locked himself out of his house and was trying
to get inside.

He was booked for disorderly conduct after "exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior," according to the Cambridge police log.

Friends
of Gates said he was already in his home when police arrived. He showed
his driver's license and Harvard identification card, but was
handcuffed and taken into police custody for several hours last
Thursday, they said.

WHEN AGNES LAWLESS and three friends were inside a Lukoil
convenience store in the Northeast at 3 a.m. last August, they'd all
but forgotten the fender-bender in which they'd been involved moments
earlier.

There was little damage, and the other driver had left the scene, near Northeast Philadelphia Airport.

What they didn't know was that they'd been rear-ended by the son of
a police officer who was on duty, and dad was about to get involved.

Lawless was standing at the counter of the store, at Comly Road and
Roosevelt Boulevard, smiling and chatting with the clerk, when she was
grabbed from behind and violently pushed back with a police officer's
gun in her face.

"He hit me with his left hand, and he had his gun in his right
hand," Lawless said. "He pushed his gun into the left side of my neck.
It caused a scrape-type bruise on my neck."

After a chaotic struggle, Lawless was arrested and charged with assaulting the officer.

In a stunningly misguided program implemented by the British
government, all children's book authors who visit schools must register
with a national database intended to protect children from pedophiles,
and they must pay a fee to do so. Beginning October 12, 2009, the Vetting and Barring Scheme
(VBS) will require that all adults who work with children, including
authors such as J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman if they make special
visits to schools, will be required to register with the database for a
fee of £64 ($105).

The Independent reports that as a result, several well-known authors will boycott schools in protest of the requirement. Philip Pullman, Anne Fine, Anthony Horowitz, Michael Morpurgo, and Quentin Blake
have all publicly stated that they object to having their names listed
in the database. Pullman, author of the popular fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials,
called the policy "corrosive and poisonous to every kind of healthy
social interaction." He eloquently adds, "This reinforces the culture
of suspicion, fear and mistrust that underlies a great deal of
present-day society. It teaches children that they should regard every
adult as a potential murderer or rapist." Anne Fine, the former Children's Laureate
for the U.K. and author of over 50 children's books, labelled the
requirement "government idiocy." "When it [the VBS] becomes essential,
I shall continue to work only in foreign schools, where sanity
prevails," she said. "The whole idea of vetting an adult who visits
many schools, but each only for a day, and then always in the presence
of other adults, is deeply offensive. Our children will become further
impoverished by this tiresome and ill-considered scheme, and yet
another gulf will be created between young people and the rest of
society."

When I was in Boulder, CO last week I went for a walk in a city-owned
"greenbelt" hiking trail. I saw this sign that read, "All bags and
coolers subject to search. City of Boulder Rangers and Police Officers
will be patrolling this area."

Are the police allowed to search your bags in a public park
without a warrant? (I saw no police officers or rangers while hiking
that day; in fact I saw no other hikers either.)

With language so broad it could include nearly any activity that protests, or conspires to protest, the practices (financial, labor or environmental) of any company, from McDonalds to Wal Mart to Chanel, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, as Rachel Meeropol explains below, is an innocent sounding law that could wield a broad brush over civil liberties.

You may not have heard of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act,
because the very first prosecution under the 2006 law is currently
underway in San Jose, California. In the case, USA v. Buddenberg,
four animal rights activists are accused of chanting, making leaflets
and writing with chalk on the sidewalk in front of a senior
bio-researcher's house, as well as using the internet to research the
company whose actions they planned to protest. Under the AETA, they are
charged with acts of animal enterprise terrorism.

The AETA
classifies a person who "intentionally damages or causes the loss of
any real or personal property" or "intentionally places a person in
reasonable fear of" death or serious bodily injury as terrorists when
they act for the "purpose of damaging or interfering with an animal
enterprise." It imposes penalties accordingly. At first blush, this may
not sound so bad. But a closer look exposes serious problems: the AETA
can be read to reach so many different types of protests and people,
and it is written in language so vague, it is impossible for someone to
know whether their actions might be covered under the AETA, and thus
great swaths of protected speech are in danger of being silenced by the
law.

To understand the fundamental threat to free speech,
the First Amendment and the right to protest that the AETA poses, it
might help to unpack the words "Animal Enterprise," "Terrorism," and
"Act."

Under the law, an animal enterprise includes any
business that deals in animal research or uses or sells animal
products. This could be read as anything from a lab conducting medical
research on monkeys to a gas station that sells beef jerky.

Every freshman who's ever taken a class in civics and government
knows that there's no point in having free speech if it only protects popular expression. Apparently, those tasked with enforcing the law in one Wisconsin town aren't aware of that rather simple axiom.

Hours before a Fourth of July parade, four police officers went to
Vito Congine's property and removed the flag under the advice of Marinette
County District Attorney Allen Brey.

Officer Adam Tavss shot and killed two alleged crime suspects in South Beach, Miami, in two seperate cases over four days last month. In both cases shootings were justified with the claim that suspects were armed, though in neither case were weapons actually found on the victims . Now audio clips are surfacing which show police knew Husien Shehada, one of the victims, was unarmed.

n the moments after a Miami Beach police officer shot and killed his
unarmed brother last month, Samer Shehada's cell phone inexplicably
began recording a series of audio clips.

The first one is the most chilling, revealing
Samer's blood-curdling pleas for his brother as police try to place him
in custody.

His brother, Husien, was laying motionless on the sidewalk after having been shot at least twice by Officer Adam Tavss - who shot and killed another man four days later.

"Please make him move ... Husien! Husien!"

"That's my brother!"

"Why did you all shoot him?"

Sirens are wailing as police tell Samer to "get in the car! ... get your ass in the car! .... Get the f*ck back!"

In
another clip, after Samer has been placed in the back of a squad car, a
conversation, apparently between two officers, can be heard.

"You sure it was the same dude?"

"We didn't find anything."

Then Samer says, "We ain't got nothing on us, man. We was just walking the street, man."

John Contini,
attorney for the Shehada family, says this clip proves that police were
lying when they said the brothers were carrying a wooden coat hanger
and a green beer bottle to give the impression that they were packing
weapons. Or at least lying when they said Husien was carrying something.

Just over a week ago, police released a second video that
shows one of the Shehada brothers apparently had something under his
shirt as well as audio clips of the 911 calls of people reporting a man
with a machine gun. It appears to have been a coat hanger. Contini
acknowledges it was Samer.

Contini
says the audio recordings on Samer's cell phone were a freak accident
because there was no way Shehada could have purposely reached into his
pocket to begin recording in the madness that ensued, which can be
clearly heard on the audio.

Contini
sent a total of 26 audio clips, each about 90 seconds. Samer can be
heard crying, praying and pleading in several of the clips, but the
most telling are the clips posted on the left side, which were
apparently recorded at 4:17 a.m. and 4:27 a.m.

The
Shehada brothers came down from Virginia with their girlfriends on
vacation. Husien was killed after a day of shopping and visiting sites
and a night of clubbing.

Contini is also representing the family of the second man shot by police four days later, Lawrence McCoy, who was killed after he had allegedly carjacked a taxi.

Police
initially said McCoy was killed after he opened fire on police, but
police now say there was no gun on him after the shooting. They also
say they recovered a gun in the waters off the MacArthur Causeway,
which is where he was killed.

Contini said McCoy was shot nine times with the autopsy showing mostly defensive wounds.

"He
was shot in the back, in the forearms, in the armpits, in the face,"
Contini said. "Those are all defensive wounds as if someone is cowering
in a defensive position."

"Imagine being in jail, and you receive a letter from your mother. It
says: "Dear Son..." It goes on for a paragraph, and then the rest of it
is a big, gaping hole, where prison censors have cut--with
scissors--biblical passages that your mom thought you might find
comforting during your incarceration. The big hole is followed by:
"Love, Mom."

This actually happened to an inmate in Virginia's Rappahannock
Regional Jail, where jail policy mandates that officials censor
biblical passages from letters written to detainees. Today, the ACLU
and ACLU of Virginia sent a letter
to Rappahannock's superintendent, Joseph Higgs, Jr., asking him to end
this policy, as it violates both detainees' and letter-writers' First
Amendment rights.

Daniel Mach, Director of Litigation for the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, said in a statement today:
"It is essential that jail officials abide by the law and the
requirements of the U.S. Constitution. People do not lose their right
to religious worship simply because they are incarcerated."

Despite the fact that a jury found Ward Churchill's firing from the Univ. of Colorado was unjust and politically motivated Judge Larry Naves finds the university Board of Regents, due to its "quasi-judicial immunity" from accountability, need not reinstate nor reimburse him.

The University of Colorado won just about everything it wanted, and Ward Churchill lost just about everything he wanted, in a ruling Tuesday by a state judge in Colorado.

Judge
Larry J. Naves ruled that the University of Colorado Board of Regents
had "quasi-judicial immunity" when it voted to fire Churchill from his
tenured position teaching ethnic studies, after faculty panels found
that he had committed multiple instances of research misconduct. Naves
vacated an April ruling by a jury in the case that found that Churchill
had been inappropriately fired. Based on that ruling, Naves could have
ordered Churchill reinstated or ordered Colorado to pay him -- issues
that would have been moot given that Naves vacated the jury's decision.
But Naves went on and said that, even based on the jury's findings,
Churchill was not entitled to his job back, or to any moneyThanks to Jonathan Turley

All states except one, Wyoming,
have some form of a shield law that allows journalists to protect their
confidential sources. Many were passed before the Internet era, but
some state courts have recently said the policies apply to bloggers
as well as to mainstream media, provided the bloggers are engaged in newsgathering and dissemination.

But a judge in New Jersey
has just made the questionable decision that blogger Shellee Hale isn't
covered by that state's reporter's shield law, which allows journalists
to protect their confidential sources.

The judge ruled that Hale shouldn't be considered a journalist because
she hadn't shown she was affiliated with a "legitimate" media outlet,
according to Law.com.

Just what's needed, more secrecy. A law designed to protect multi-billion dollar investment banks like Goldman Sachs from public scrutiny, in the form of nosy bloggers, of its program trading activities.

This is complicated stuff (for people with no financial background,
like me, it's nightmarish) and I have a longer thing about this coming
out later. But the essence of this story is that Tyler Durden over at
Zero Hedge has, for months, been complaining that Goldman has been
manipulating the NYSE, in particular manipulating program trading in
somewhat the same way (although perhaps not to the same extent) that
they manipulated the commodities markets. In order to make his case --
and his theory has gained a lot of acceptance, to the point where
Goldman had to respond to the allegations publicly -- he has been
analyzing data the NYSE releases on program trading every week.

So what happened this week? The NYSE announced that it will no
longer be releasing its weekly program trading data. This is quiet
obviously a move designed to make it even more impossible to track
what's going on in the NYSE and shield, in particular, Goldman Sachs.
Let's hope there's a public uproar about this; Zero Hedge posted
contact info for NYSE officials, and has urged readers to petition the
exchange to restore the old rules in the name of transparency.

Few people have seen the eye-catching magazine cover designed by
students at Orange High School, with its stark image of a man's back
tattooed with the title - "OHS Pulp" - in Old English script.

That's
because almost every copy of the student magazine is locked away in the
office of Principal SK Johnson. He confiscated the magazine after
deciding the tattoo on the cover was "gang-looking" and an article
inside was inappropriate.

His action has drawn protest not just
from the students who put together the magazine, but also from
student-press advocates across the country. They say Johnson took a big
step over a legal line drawn clearly by California's constitution.

"It
was not an easy decision," Johnson said. "But we have an image of our
school that I want to uphold. I don't think that (cover) was promoting
what we want to promote at our school."

Account of Shreveport resident Robert Baillio, who got pulled over for having two
pro-gun bumper stickers on the back of his truck -- and had his licensed gun
confiscated.According to Cedric Glover, mayor of Shreveport, Louisiana, his cops
"have a power that [. . .] the President of these Unites States does
not have": His cops can take away your rights.

And would you like to guess which rights he has in mind?

Just ask Shreveport resident Robert Baillio, who got pulled over
for having two pro-gun bumper stickers on the back of his truck -- and
had his gun confiscated.

While the officer who pulled him over says Baillio failed to use
his turn signal, the only questions he had for Baillio concerned guns:
Whether he had a gun, where the gun was, and if he was a member of the
NRA. No requests for a driver's licence, proof of insurance, or vehicle
registration -- and no discussion of a turn signal.

Accordingly, Baillio told the officer the truth, which led the
police officer to search his car without permission and confiscate his
gun.

However, not only does Louisiana law allow resident to drive with
loaded weapons in their vehicles, but Mr. Baillio possessed a concealed
carry license!

What does such behavior demonstrate, other than transparent
political profiling -- going so far as to use the infamous Department
of Homeland Security report on "Americans of a rightwing persuasion" as
a how-to guidebook, no less?

Mr. Baillio made no secret of his political affiliations: An
American flag centers a wide flourish of pro-freedom stickers and
decals on his back windshield.

In fact, when Baillio asked the officer if everyone he pulls over
gets the same treatment, the officer said no and pointed to the back of
his truck.

Many modern (and ancient) narratives, art and musical works have been based on creative riffs on, appropriations and transformations of aspects of previous works. Such apparently was the idea of Frederick Colting in a novel titled 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye,imagining what a 76 year old Holden Caulfield, called Mr. C in the book, might have become, six decades after the events portrayed in Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. But, unless we buy the UK edition, we in the US will never know because, according to a US district court judge, copyright now means the right to control all imaginative appropriations of as book's characters and themes.

In a victory for the reclusive writer J. D. Salinger,
a federal judge on Wednesday indefinitely banned publication in the
United States of a new book by a Swedish author that contains a
76-year-old version of Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of "The
Catcher in the Rye."

In a 37-page ruling, Judge Batts issued a preliminary injunction --
indefinitely banning the publication, advertising or distribution of
the book in this country -- after considering the merits of the case.
The book has been published in Britain.

"I am pretty blown away by the judge's decision," Mr. Colting said
in an e-mail message after the ruling. "Call me an ignorant Swede, but
the last thing I thought possible in the U.S. was that you banned
books." Mr. Colting and his lawyer, Edward H. Rosenthal,
said they would appeal. The decision means that "members of the public
are deprived of the chance to read the book and decide for themselves
whether it adds to their understanding of Salinger and his work," Mr.
Rosenthal said.

In a copyright infringement lawsuit filed
June 1, lawyers for Mr. Salinger contended that the new work was
derivative of "Catcher" and Holden Caulfield, and infringed on Mr.
Salinger's copyright.

The work by Mr. Colting, 33, centers on a 76-year-old "Mr. C," the
creation of a writer named Mr. Salinger. Although the name Holden
Caulfield does not appear in the book, Mr. C is clearly Holden, one of
the best-known adolescent figures in American fiction, aged 60 years.

(The similarities between the characters were not much in dispute.
As Judge Batts wrote in her ruling, "Both narratives are told from the
first-person point of view of a sarcastic, often uncouth protagonist
who relies heavily on slang, euphemisms and colloquialisms, makes
constant digression and asides, refers to readers in the second person,
constantly assures the reader that he is being honest and that he is
giving them the truth.")

Mr. Colting's lawyers argued, among other things, that the new novel, titled "60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye," did not violate copyright laws because it amounted to a critical parody that had the effect of transforming the original work.

Prince George's County police are reviewing the actions of an officer
who arrested a motorist on charges of slugging and tackling him during
a traffic stop in Hyattsville. A police video of the encounter last
year shows the officer yanking the man out of his car, slugging him
twice and tackling him.

"Step out of the car now, or I'll have you out of the car," Cpl. Steven
Jackson says after the motorist does not comply with three rapid-fire
demands to exit the car.

"You yelling, but you have to give me a reason to step out of the car," Shawn M. Leake, 24, replies.

Jackson opens the driver's side door and pulls Leake out of the car.
Almost immediately, Jackson makes a fist and slugs Leake in the face,
then quickly slugs him again in the face, the video shows. Leake does
not hit or appear to try to punch Jackson.